Cheap as chips

One of the unexpected delights of regional living is how cheap everything is. This is still dizzyingly exciting to me. Recently I joined a local gym and realised, with delight, that my monthly membership fee is now almost half that of my former Sydney fitness centre. My car insurance has gone down dramatically; clothes/shoes/toiletries are so cheap here it’s hard to contain a spontaneous spending spree. Hairdressers/beauticians are steal and eating out – whoa….at prices this low how do bistros and restaurants even stay in business?

The Country Mouse doesn’t see it this way. In fact he and I have a serious price disconnect. It’s quite profound and arises dramatically wherever and whenever money is involved (i.e. everywhere): eating in, eating out, purchasing any kind of service and also extends to clothes, holidays and the cost of housing.

“Look at the cost!” he moans while I exclaim, “Yes! How cheap is that?”,

thinking (foolishly I now know) that we were walking and talking in financial sync.

He blames his Scottish heritage for his tightness with money, but I won’t put up with a bar of it, I could just as well claim that my Irish heritage means that I have a live for today, spend and be damned financial frame of mind. After all, who knows what might happen tomorrow – we’ll all be blown to pieces in a bout of random sectarian violence?

I have come up with a range of snappy one-line money retorts for the CM: “You get what you pay for”, “Be mean with money and money will be mean with you”, “Money is your servant not your master”. He must be sorely sick of hearing them by now, but I do think they are chipping away at his former poverty thinking because recently he had a significant breakthrough.

The Country Mouse threw out something that was broken. You have to know the CM to realize the gravity, the earth-shifting significance of this action and I still applaud his courage to leap into this new unknown emotional territory.

It went like this. The CM has a beloved plastic jug, one which he uses regularly to warm liquids in the microwave. That the rim of this jug had numerous chunks out of it, where they had broken off through wear and tear, and that the handle was seriously cracked – in fact just hanging on by a plastic thread – meant nothing to him. “Look at this jug!” I squealed. “What is wrong with it?” he replied. That kinda says it all.

I reassured him that a new jug was not negotiable, but he was not persuaded. On a visit to K-mart shortly afterward I saw my opportunity, not so subtlety steering him in the direction of microwaveable containers. “Look – a jug, just like the one you have – only not broken. Mmmm, mmmm and sooo cheap”.

The CM frowned; I could see his acute financial and behavioural distress. It meant two difficult, unpleasant things were now going to have to be considered simultaneously: firstly, spending money on a new jug, secondly, the possibility that this signaled the broken jug was on its way out. The first problem was easily addressed – I would buy the new jug. He relented, I could spend the extravagant sum, $7.00, on a new jug, but the old jug had to stay.

I love coaching, in fact I would have liked to have been a personal coach, getting people to move out of their comfort zones and shoot for the stars is one of my favourite things to do. This was an opportunity for me to be partner-as-coach, moving the CM out of his broken goods zone and into a shiny new future – or at least hold his hand while he threw out a jug long past its use by date.

We were standing in the kitchen, “You can do this darling, you can do this, I believe in you” I urged. The Country Mouse looked unconvinced, sadly eyeing the old broken jug as though it was a dear family pet about to be euthanised.

“CM you have to be strong, there isn’t room in the cupboard for them both – one of them has to go. And you know which one that is.” His genuine pain at casting that chewed up old jug into the recycling was something to behold. I did feel compassion, I just wasn’t budging.

It’s so hard to move out of our self-imposed comfort zones; they may be warm and familiar but by their nature they stop us growing. I’ve hurtled into the Country Mouse’s life like a cleanout and let’s-move-on tsunami and he has worn my whirlwind activity with grace and good humour. It’s a mark of the man. Love you Country Mouse!